December 6th, 2018-May 31, 2019

Lilian Garcia-Roig, a Department of Art Professor is one of the 25 artists in the nation to be featured by the Joan Mitchell Foundation as part of its 25th Anniversary celebrations. She is included in the exhibition and book titled “Widening Circles: Portraits from the Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Community at 25 Years”. This exhibition opens on December 6th in the New York City headquarters of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and will then travel to the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in May. Lilian Garcia-Roig is the only artist from Florida to be included in this exhibition and corresponding book.

The exhibition and book both feature a portrait of each of the 25 artists taken by photographer Reginald Eldridge, Jr. as he traveled across the country to interview and photograph each of them in their personal studio spaces. Alongside each portrait is a corresponding impact statement reflecting on the importance of financial and programmatic support that the Joan Mitchell Foundation has had on their personal art practice. The book will be available in print format at the Joan Mitchell Foundation headquarters and will also be made available digitally on the Foundation’s website.

The idea for the Widening Circles project came from a desire to illustrate the impact of artist Joan Mitchell’s vision to support artists directly and immediately through grants and programs, and to celebrate the artists the Foundation has had privilege to intersect with the during the past 25 years… Widening Circles serves as a testament to Mitchell’s pioneering notion of generosity and steadfast belief in the creation of a community of support that provides resources for artists to have time and space to think, create, and innovate. The artists’ impact statements, which form the core of Widening Circles, also help to illuminate how the Foundation can continue to fulfill and enhance its mission in the current philanthropic and cultural landscape.

– Joan Mitchell Foundation Press Release

Professor Garcia-Roig’s relationship with the Joan Mitchell Foundation started back in 2006 when she and Professor Mark Messersmith both received the highly prestigious national Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant for painting. That grant helped her continue to increase the size and scope of her multi-panel on-site painting installations which were later exhibited in numerous museums and galleries across the country. Then, in 2017, she was selected to be an Artist-In-Residence (A-I-R) at the Joan Mitchell Center (JMC) in New Orleans where she created an entirely new body of work based on her first ever working trip to Cuba. It is important to note that the the new work she made while at the JMC was based on her recently completed “Hecho En Cuba” (“Made In Cuba”) series which was possible, in part, because of a 2017 FSU spring sabbatical she was awarded. The A-I-R studio environment at the JMC turned out to be ideal setting for her to reflect upon and respond to that experience. The concentrated studio focus and interaction with other artists supported her exploration and experimentation with new directions in her work. This, in turn, led to the creation of the “Hyphenated Nature” and “Hecho Con Cuba” (“Made With Cuba”) series, two radically different bodies of work that explore the relationship between her Cuban and American identities through place/displacement, sampled modernist-aesthetics, and pictorial as well as actual landscape.